The Readiness4REF (R4R) project, led by King's College London and the University of Southampton, will investigate and implement how to streamline the REF data gathering exercise by building an interoperable institutional infrastructure, including repositories, that would capture and manage research outputs and other factors. R4R wil start by analysing current practice to look at the data already being collected by HEIs, and the systems they use. This will be compared to the data we anticipate being required for REF (admittedly, a moving target) to draw up a specification. It will also study the CERIF metadata model - which is receiving growing interest from the repository community as well as in research information systems - to see how it could deal with REF data requirements. We anticipate CERIF will need augmenting with addditional elements for this purpose, and will develop an application profile called CERIF4REF. The AP will specify which elements are required, and give guidance/instruction for the content of those fields. CERIF4REF will be evaluated against the real-world settings of case studies in pilot institutions, and submitted formally for adoption by euroCRIS (the membership organisation responsible for CERIF). At the same time, it will be mapped to external data sources, such as research councils or publishers like Thompson ISI and Elsevier. Presuming the various pilots are successful, developers will create plug-ins for the ePRints, DSpace and Fedora Commons repository platforms. King's and Southampton will adopt demonstrator repositories which implement CERIF4REF to manage data from internal and external sources ready for REF submission. There will even be exchange of data between the two institutions to mimic the movement of academics. RFR will ensure to consult and inform the community through the life of the project, not least through the REF Stakeholders Group of interested parties brought together by King's and HEFCE in three recent conferences (http://www.kcl.ac.uk/iss/research/ref/). Project start date: 2009-04-01. Project end date: 2011-03-01. (Excerpt from this source)